Saturday, September 20, 2014

Horses of Honor

All over the city, Horses of Honor are on display. These life-size fiberglass statues of Chicago's police horses were designed to raise awareness and support for the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation. There are 16 horses currently on display with 40 more expected to roll out shortly. The featured horses will be on display around the city through mid-November.

Friday, September 19, 2014

A VERY IMPORTANT LETTER VIA DOVER SADDLERY!! PLEASE SHARE AND HELP IF YOU CAN!! Read more details about the track closing in the article below. ~DECLAN

Dear Fellow Equestrian,

After a 79 year legacy of horse racing, Suffolk Downs has announced that it will be closing its starting gates at the end of the 2014 Season on September 29th. Many of the Thoroughbreds that have found their first careers at the track will be in need of new homes and jobs after the closing. While there will be a grace period after the track closes in order to allow horses to be matched with new owners, CANTER New England, a non-profit horse welfare group, expects that over 100 horses will need to be re-homed by mid-October.

For those interested in purchasing one of the Suffolk Downs OTTBs, CANTER New England will be hosting an Open House at Suffolk Downs on Sunday, September 27th from 8:30am until 12:00 pm. Additionally, a CANTER New England representative will be available at the track on Wednesday, September 24th. If you are unable to attend the open house, please email CANTER at adoptions@canterne.org to schedule a time. Buyer resources, such as transportation, veterinarian, and guides to answer questions about transitioning a race horse to farm life, will be available to interested buyers.

We here at Dover Saddlery have been a longtime supporter of CANTER New England and have purchased horses from Suffolk Downs in the past. In a further effort to help support the re-homing of these horses, we will be provide buyers of these Suffolk Downs OTTBs a starter kit that includes a halter, lead rope and a $20 Dover Saddlery gift certificate.

If you'd like to view available horses, please visit CANTER New England atwww.canterusa.org/newengland, and join us for the Open House at Suffolk Downs later this month. Keep following our blog for updates and special features on the promising Suffolk Downs OTTBs that are in need of a new home to help take them to their next winner's circle.

Please feel free to forward this email to your fellow equestrians and help spread the news.

Where 700 Horses At Suffolk Downs Will Go After The Races Shut Down

A Suffolk Downs horse race is seen here in this 2007 file photo. (Lisa Poole/AP)

BOSTON — There are 700 horses in the stables at Suffolk Downs in Revere.

In fewer than two weeks, the sounds of their thundering hooves will no longer be heard at the 80-year-old racetrack situated in East Boston.

What happens after that?

“Most of them will go somewhere else to race,” said Osvaldo Rivera, a horse trainer who has been working at Suffolk Downs for 30 years. “The ones who can’t compete will be given away as riding horses or ponies or whatever.”

Of the 700 horses at Suffolk Downs, those not fit for racing will likely be given up for adoption. (Delores Handy/WBUR)

Rivera said that the horses will likely all go to adoption.

“They can’t go to slaughter. We can’t do that anymore,” he said.

Suffolk Downs investors have been hemorrhaging money in hopes that a casino licence would turn things around, but thatlicense went to Everett instead.

Chip Tuttle, the chief operating officer of Suffolk Downs, said the track has been losing money since 2006 to the tune of over $50 million.

Tuttle said that with the financial losses, it’s impossible to continue running the facility. He said the racing track will need to be shuttered by the end of the year.

The track’s closure would put about 1,100 track employees out of work. Those workers, plus blacksmiths and others in allied fields, could mean upwards of 2,000 jobs impacted, according to track officials.

Tammi Piermarini is one of those people. Over 30 years ago, she started her racing career at Suffolk Downs. She is now the third leading female jockey in the history of horse racing.

“I was 18 when I began racing, and I remember coming in my first day riding,” she recalled. “You see where we stand today? You couldn’t move, there were so many people. The crowds. It was almost like being at the Kentucky Derby. That’s how many people.”

Piermarini had hoped for a return to those golden days of horse racing, but said her hopes were dashed with this week’s casino decision.

“The loss of the casino is the final straw. That would have helped us out immensely. It would have brought more trainers in. It would have brought more riders in. And it would have brought a different crowd in,” she said. “It definitely would have revitalized the industry and would have saved a lot of people that had farms.”

George Brown has a farm in Rehoboth. He says closing Suffolk Downs means the end of a family legacy.

“My farm has been in my family since 1850. I have the original deed. My great-great-grandfather bought the farm for $575. As far as my farm is concerned: with horses, it’s done,” Brown said.

The final Suffolk Downs horse race is scheduled for Sept. 29. The track will close for good in December.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

This is really cool! I love the jump - it's just amazing - the technology is unbelievable. This would be fun to make! ~Declan

3D Printed Horse Jump Takes First Place at the Zoetis $1 Million Grand Prix

By Scott J Grunewald On Fri, September 12, 2014

Equestrian competition producer HITS Inc recently held the Zoetis $1 Million Grand Prix and featured a horse jump 3D printed to look like a syringe full of the main sponsors veterinary surgical aid product Dormosedan Gel.

HITS inc. president Tom Struzzieri also happens to be on the board of the State University of New York New Paltz 3D Printing Initiative. The SUNY Advanced Manufacturing Center director and dean of the School of Science and Engineering Daniel Freedman oversaw the 3D printed horse jump project, which had his team create and assemble it for the race. The only part of the build that wasn’t 3D printed was the barrel of the syringe, which was made of 6” PVC pipe.

The 3D printed parts were made on a Stratasys Dimension 1200ES, an industrial FDM printer that uses high quality ABSplus thermoplastic. It took Freedman and Assistant Director of the Advanced Manufacturing Center Kat Wilson – who designed the jump and built most of it - about 10 days to print all of the components, and then another four days to paint and assemble the syringe shaped horse jump.

Because the 1200ES only has a 10″x10″12″ build plate, Wilson needed to be very clever in designing the jump. It needed to fit together seamlessly, and remain sturdy and durable during an event where it would be subjected to large animals potentially kicking it or stepping on it without going over budget and making it too expensive to produce. As you can see, Wilson ended up breaking the syringe up into 20 individual pieces.

While the frame of the jump was a standard 3.5” wood jump rail, there was concern about how well the syringe would stand up if it was knocked off the rail or stepped on by a horse. Thus, Wilson’s primary challenge was to create a jump strong enough to survive contact with a horse. While Freedman told me that he believed it would have been okay if it was simply kicked or knocked off of the rail, he admitted that it probably would not have survived had a horse actually stepped on it.
Thankfully, the syringe-shaped jump never had to be subjected to a horse related stress test and it made it through the entire event completely undamaged. For his part, Struzzieri was very pleased with the 3D printed jump, and even expressed interest in creating more of them for future horse jumping events.

The SUNY New Paltz 3D Printing Initiative has created a unique curriculum for Digital Design and Fabrication aimed at creating an advanced-level workforce. The initiative also offers students the chance to work on projects for local businesses and industries and collaborates with local community colleges and high schools to expand 3D printing education in the region.
Here’s a great video about how 3D printing came to SUNY New Paltz:

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Warning that horse meat issue could recur

Tuesday 9 September 2014 As posted on heraldscotlandANOTHER horse meat scandal will emerge as some European countries have made no changes since the "storm" died down, a former Coalition Government farm-ing minister has warned.

David Heath told the Commons some member states opted against taking action as they did not want to remind people what had occurred and hoped the problem would go away once the "press and media furore" had calmed.

Mr Heath, a minister who helped lead the UK's response, blamed large-scale organised crime based in Europe for causing the scandal, noting the problem will arise again as they were continuing to make huge sums of money.

Horse DNA was found in frozen burgers supplied to several supermarkets in January 2013.

Investigations also found other beef products sold by retailers, including lasagne and spaghetti bolognese, were contaminated while meals in schools and hospitals had to be withdrawn after it was found they contained horse meat.

Asked if he was disappointed no convictions had been brought following the horse meat scandal, Mr Heath said: "I find it enormously frustrating because (former environ-ment secretary Owen Pater-son) and I did absolutely everything we could to mobilise and to energise enforcement agencies across Europe to make sure that this was traced.

"I believe that at the root of this was large-scale organised crime - European-based organised crime.

"I believe that more could and should have been done by other member states to get to the bottom of it.

"But I felt that having raised the issue in European Council meetings, there was then a palpable feeling from some member states that once the media furore had died down then, well, 'let's not push it too hard shall we chaps'."

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Don't let Tennessee's Walking Horse be a dying breed

The dust is finally settling from the 76th Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration and what may have been the worst attended in recent decades of the 11-day iconic Shelbyville event.

Photographs and videos indicate the 25,000 seat Calsonic Arena held about 3,000 to 5,000 people on Aug. 30, the final night of competition when the grand champion is named.

Industry diehards blamed rain, but that's a fallacy.

In 1966 in Shelbyville, the heavens threw daggers of lightning and buckets of rain onto the stadium and show ring during the 28th Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration.

The towering bleachers were packed and nobody left -- even with lightning strikes flying, witnesses attest. That was the year Shakers Shocker defeated 15 to 20 competitors to win the World Grand Championship.

But that was before the sport was almost completely corrupted by "professional" trainers and owners who resorted to chemicals and other abusive methods to short-cut training for this steady and beautiful breed.

That was also before soring -- as we've come to know it today -- forced the horses to step unnaturally higher and further, all to avoid the pain when their high-shod hooves and chemically abraded legs touched the ground. Soring is the use of substances, painful shoeing techniques and objects hidden beneath outrageously sized pads that force the horses to high step around the show ring. Soring is what the world finally saw, up close, in videos secretly recorded in Celebration Hall of Fame trainer Jackie McConnell's stables by operatives of the Humane Society of the United States a few years ago. The tapes were turned over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and then to U.S. attorneys in Chattanooga. McConnell later became the first person in the history of the 40-year-old federal Horse Protection Act to be criminally prosecuted and convicted.

The upheaval McConnell's conviction caused in the industry and among fans of the walking horse continues to smother the walking horse industry and this beautiful, steady breed of horse. But it hasn't stopped the soring.

Only three horses entered the ring to compete for the 76th World Championship title. Abuse inspectors -- mostly USDA vets and technicians -- had disqualified the rest of the field. They were disqualified based on evidence the inspectors deemed to be signs of soring abuse.

The winning horse, named I am Jose, has no soring violation history, but other horses in his bloodline do. So do his owners and trainers, according to USDA violation records in a database maintained by Friends of Sound Horses, a horse organization that has taken a decided stand against animal abuse.

But the walking horse industry as a whole -- as opposed to horse fans -- has been slow to acknowledge the apparently rampant soring abuse: FOSH's database provides 28 years of Horse Protection Act and soring violations, showing more than 12,500 violations as well as a "Repeat Violators" report with hundreds of single-spaced pages.

Industry stalwarts have insisted that McConnell and his ilk represented just "a few bad apples."

For weeks leading up to this year's Celebration, officials touted a new "world class" trio of veterinarians who would oversee inspections to prove the industry's commitment to no cheating. But these officials neglected to disclose that one of the vets had never agreed to participate and wasn't at the 11-day event. Another had ties to the industry dating back years and to lobbying efforts to have the Horse Protection Act amended to be less protective (though it's hard to imagine how a 40-year-old protection act with only the first conviction in 2012 could be much less protective).

When the Tennessean reported gaping problems in the Celebration veterinarian committee, officials quickly backtracked, saying the vets didn't have to be present to oversee the inspections. Let us guess: Inspections by telepathy? Clearly the vets idea was a public relations stunt to protect the industry, not the horses.

Now these soring loyalists -- the ones who've ratcheted up the "big lick" with out-sized pads, chains, chemicals and whatever it takes -- are also fighting proposed amendments to toughen the existing law. The amendments are known as the PAST Act, and they would outlaw the pads and chains that hide and exacerbate the chemicals and foreign objects.

It is clear that fans -- along with plenty of owners of show-worthy walking horses -- stayed out of the arena this year in an effort to get the message across to the industry diehards: Walking horses don't need lumbering "big licks" to be exciting.

Shakers Shocker and the horses before him proved that when they so electrified crowds that not even lightning kept fans away.

Bring those horses -- and that natural gait with flat-shod hooves -- back.

Support the PAST Act. This industry doesn't have to die. It just has to return to its horse-loving, solid footing.

In this 2007 file photo, an inmate works with "Norton" in the round pen with part of the herd in the background as part of the wild horse program at the Gunnison State Prison in Gunnison. Tom Smart, Deseret News

Summary

A disagreement over costs has led to a suspension of the wild horse training program at the Central Utah Correctional Facility at Gunnison, meaning the 1,500 horses stabled there will have to be moved to new locations in the next 30 days.

“We are not able to sustain the program without losing money. The program was not cost effective and we do not know if it was effective in reducing recidivism. We do know it was not serving a lot of inmates.” ~Mike Haddon, Utah Department of Corrections

GUNNISON — Disagreement over the costs associated with a wild horse gentling program at the Gunnison prison has led to its suspension, and efforts are underway to find a place for 1,500 horses.

The program's cessation means the Bureau of Land Management will move about 90 percent of the animals to out-of-state facilities, with a prison-imposed deadline to have that accomplished by Oct. 6.

"The BLM's Utah State Office has valued our relationship with the Utah Department of Corrections and regret that it has decided to terminate the Wild Horse Inmate Program at Gunnison," said Tom Gorey, acting spokesman for the BLM in Utah.

"This program has aided in the rehabilitation of inmates and has, through the gentling of horses, helped place animals into good, private care."

Gorey added that the state agency decision to end the program will complicate national efforts to make sure there is enough off-range holding capacity for wild horses and burros that are removed off public ranges.

Mike Haddon, deputy director of the Utah Department of Corrections, said the program was losing money and had very little inmate participation. The BLM was informed of the agency's decision on Friday.

"We are not able to sustain the program without losing money," he said. "The program was not cost-effective, and we do not know if it was effective in reducing recidivism. We do know it was not serving a lot of inmates."

Since its inception in 2007, the program had 175 inmates who gentled horses for the public to adopt through BLM-managed programs. Of those 175 graduates, Haddon said only 82 of them had been released from prison — too small a number to effectively judge if the program had any viable, lasting impacts.

Haddon said the differences over money arose in 2012 when the initial five-year contract was renegotiated from a per-head, per day rate to another model of reimbursement.

"There was a discrepancy and dispute between what the BLM believes the department should be reimbursed and what the department believes it should be reimbursed," he said.

An audit by the Office of Inspector General released last year shows a more than million-dollar discrepancy between the two entities that raised questions over the costs.

The Utah Correctional Industries under which the program operated reported costs of a little more than $5.3 million for the five-year contract period, of which auditors said $1 million was "questioned" —or not allowable under the terms of the agreement.

Of that million dollars, $928,000 was deemed "unsupported," meaning documentation related to the costs was insufficient, the report said.

The audit concluded that the discrepancy in costs and conflicting reimbursements arose from the use of different accounting systems between the state and federal government.

In the case of the Utah Correctional Industries — which Haddon said is mandated to be self-sustaining — the audit said its accounting records and financial statements were organized like that of a business enterprise fund and not typical of government operations.

The BLM estimates that it has overpaid Utah Correctional Industries by about $2 million, Gorey said, adding that the agency is in the process of securing an outside, independent audit to verify this figure.

SAFE Act

The Safeguard American Food Exports "SAFE" H.R.1942 is the current bill proposed in the House and Senate to protect American horses from slaughter. PLEASE contact your legisltors and ask the to cosponsor and support SAFE.

Children 4 Horses is on Facebook

Declan Bio

Declan is honored to be the 2012 ASPCA's Humane Kid of the Year and the first ever recipient of the ASPCA Junior Equine Angel Award. Declan is also an ASPCA Junior Equine Welfare Ambassador.

After hearing about the inhumane and cruel practice of horse slaughter, now ten-year-old Declan, decided he needed to raise his voice. He created Children 4 Horses, to spread the word about horse advocacy issues and worked diligently with the Million Horse March campaign to collect letters from children to inspire lawmakers to end the slaughter of American horses.

Declan’s dedication to horse advocacy brought him to the nation’s capital twice, where he represented over 1,000 children from the United States by presenting the letters to legislators in Congress. While in Washington DC, Declan met with Congressman Frank Guinta of New Hampshire, where he shared his opposition to the inhumane treatment of horses and subsequently garnered the Congressman’s co-sponsorship of the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (S.1176/H.R.2966).

Declan also joined forces with the “Horses on the Hill” campaign, speaking before celebrities, Congressmen and Senators to lobby against horse slaughter and advocate for the protection of horses under S.1176/H.R.2966. In addition to his three Washington DC visits, Declan testified at a hearing for a bill opposing horse slaughter at the New Hampshire State House in January, 2012.